Matthew Chrisman

This paper considers two competing pictures of knowledge of what one ought to do—one which assimilates this to other propositional knowledge conceived as partial ‘locational’ knowledge of where one is in a space of possibilities, the other which distinguishes this from other propositional knowledge by construing it as partial ‘directional’ knowledge of what to do in particular circumstances. I argue that the apparent tension can be lessened by better understanding the contextualized modal-cum-prescriptive nature of ‘ought’ and enriching our conception of the kinds of possibilities within which we can locate ourselves

Are moral standards relative to cultures? Are there any moral facts? What is goodness? If there are moral facts how do we learn about them?_ _These are all questions in metaethics, the branch of ethics that investigates the status of morality, the nature of ethical facts, and the meaning of ethical statements. To the uninitiated it can appear abstract and far removed from its two more concrete cousins, ethical theory and applied ethics, yet it is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of ethics. _What is this thing called Metaethics?_ demystifies this important subject and is ideal for students coming to it for the first time. Beginning with a brief historical overview of metaethics and the development of a "conceptual toolkit," Matthew Chrisman introduces and assesses the following key topics: • ethical reality: including questions about naturalism and non-naturalism, moral facts, and the distinction between realism and antirealism • ethical language: does language represent reality? What mental states are expressed by moral statements? • ethical psychology: the Humean theory of motivation and the connection between moral judgement and motivation • ethical knowledge: intuitionist and coherentist moral epistemologies, and theories of objectivity and relativism in metaethics • new directions in metaethics, including non-traditional theories and extensions to metaepistemology and metanormative theory. Additional features such as chapter summaries, questions of understanding, and a glossary make this an ideal introduction to metaethics.

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamental questions about the nature of states and their relationship to the citizens within those states Epistemology – what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; and whether we should form beliefs by trusting what other people tell us; Philosophy of mind – what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Philosophy of science – foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice, such as whether scientific theories are true; and Metaphysics - fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as whether we have free will, or whether time travel is possible. This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ MOOC created by the University of Edinburgh’s _Eidyn_ research centre, and hosted by the Coursera platform.This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline.

Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise of cognitive agency that I view as central to any account of epistemic normativity and doxastic agency. Although the etiology of a belief can be relevant to its normative status, often so much more is relevant and more centrally so. This generates a dilemma for anyone following Sosa in pursuing the idea that epistemic normativity is a species of performance normativity.

In the past few years, the United States has seen violent street protests in response to police killing unarmed people of color, angry protests by university students concerned about the racist legacy of their institutions, and verbally disruptive protests inside rallies of the (then) Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. Some of these acts of protest have been clearly legal, protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution; others, by contrast, have not, but may nevertheless be be defensible acts of politically motivated disobedience. We are interested here in both legal and illegal acts of protest, but our focus here will be primarily on the latter, for the philosophical literature on protest has focused mostly on illegal cases. Elsewhere, we argue that a fruitful avenue for exploring these issues is to take a speech-act theoretic approach to them. In this paper we compare and contrast this approach with more prominent views of protest (viz., liberal and republican views of civil disobedience). Our goal is to explore the variety of ways in which political dissent, even when it is illegal, may be justified.

This paper compares and contrasts two recent approaches to the theory of normative concepts with each other and with more traditional theories in metaethics, in order to highlight several different projects one could be engaged in when developing a theory of normative concepts. The two accounts derive from Millgram, The Great Endarkenment and Chrisman The Meaning of ‘Ought’. These accounts share in rejecting traditional attempts to explain what ‘ought’ is about or expresses. Instead these accounts treat ‘ought’ as a quantificational word. However, the nature and range of the quantification are importantly different in the two accounts, which impacts on the ways in which the accounts integrate with the various projects one could be engaged in when developing a theory of normative concepts.

Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise of cognitive agency that I view as central to any account of epistemic normativity and doxastic agency. Although the etiology of a belief can be relevant to its normative status, often so much more is relevant and more centrally so. This generates a dilemma for anyone following Sosa in pursuing the idea that epistemic normativity is a species of performance normativity.

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject.Key topics and their areas of focus include:Epistemology - what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it;Philosophy of Science - foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice;Philosophy of Mind - what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;Moral Philosophy - the nature of our moral judgements and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and;Metaphysics - fundamental conceptual questions about the nature of reality.Designed to be used on the corresponding Introduction to Philosophy online course offered by The University of Edinburgh, this book is also highly recommended to anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline.

An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is allowed, forbidden, required, or obligatory, in view of the requirements of morality, the law, one's preferences or goals, or what an authority has commanded: in short, deontic modality. This volume presents new work on the much-discussed topic of deontic modality by leading figures in the philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and linguistic semantics. The papers tackle issues about the place of decision and probability theory in the semantics of deontic modality, the viability of standard possible worlds treatments of the truth conditions of deontic modal sentences, the possibility of dynamic semantic treatments of deontic modality, the methodology of semantics for deontic modals, and the prospects for representationalist, expressivist, and inferentialist treatments of deontic modality.

Discussions about the meaning of the word “ought” are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word “ought” describes a real relation, roughly, of being obligated to or expresses some non-cognitive attitude toward agents acting in certain ways. Second, in theoretical linguistics this word is classified as a modal auxiliary verb alongside words like “might,” “may,” “can,” “must,” etc. This leads some theoretical linguists to claim that the word “ought” is a weak necessity modal, which can be modeled with universal quantification over a restricted set of possible worlds. This chapter seeks some resolution of this tension by showing how versions of realism and expressivism can be modified in light of the best semantics of “ought” as a weak necessity modal. In addition, the chapter explains how this semantics might point to a third view—inferentialism—that accounts for the meaning of “ought” not in terms of what relation it describes, nor in terms of what attitude it expresses, but rather in terms of its inferential role.

In the attempt to understand the norms governing believers, epistemologists have tended to focus on individual belief as the primary object of epistemic evaluation. However, norm governance is often assumed to concern, at base, things we can do as a free exercise or manifestation of our agency. Yet believing is not plausibly conceived as something we freely do but rather as a state we are in, usually as the mostly automatic or involuntary result of cognitively processes shaped by nature, bias, and ideology. In this paper, I sketch a response to this tension. This response is based on rejecting the traditional theoretical focus on an individual’s particular beliefs as the primary object of normative epistemic evaluation. If we shift our focus from the particular beliefs of individuals to the community and its information managing practices, we may lessen the tension between norm governance and automaticity and involuntariness in a way that construes autonomous cognitive agency as a resultant of rather than a precondition for our norm-governed epistemic sociality.